Monday, November 23, 2009

Microblogging

I made this comment on the soccer boards I occasionally frequent but it was a decent rant.

I dislike micro-blogs like Twitter and social web sites used like micro-blogs. Sentence fragments are replacing meaningful dialog. I get so tired of the cryptic crap like "so many things wrong with today." What? Did your cat die? Are you on the rag? Did you get a skunky beer? Is your boss licking your coffee cup while you sleep at your desk?

What?

It seems like every tweet or status update from a friend below the age of 27 is like this.

The problem with these sentence shortened cries for attention is that unless you are tight within the sphere of friends and know what is going on you are left to draw your own conclusions about what is really going on in their lives. This is especially true for public figures that post these dramatic little giblets about their lives leading to four or fifty different interpretations to what they actually meant. Twitter updates sometimes worse than the Bible for interpretation.

Why the drama?

I realize that I am not using the latest and greatest iDroid portable media server/game console/camera/asset manager/phone and probably do not understand what is really going on. I understand that text messaging is the cool thing to be doing right now and that these short cryptic messages are really some English sub-language I will never understand or whatever. But, if you have friends or people that you want to be up-to-date with every little detail of your life then are you really doing a disservice to friends left guessing about the seriousness of the situation? Yoda is a better conversationalist.

1 comment:

Depends on what you think the intent of Twitter and other micr-blogs to be. I tend to use it for short little adhoc thoughts and irks right at the moment. A longer more thought out entry will be written in a blog. I've found many an useful link from twitter, and if somebody becomes uninteresting in their tweets, they are just an unfollow click away.

I've also found it invaluable in helping to promote projects or status of a project that might not be seen other ways. There are stupid tweets as there are stupid blog entries, but I just don't follow those people or blogs.